Bonus Episode 1 – Which page should you optimize first?

My name is Khalil Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

While pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live, our podcast today, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the CRO Live, our podc. I'm your co host, Simba Dube. So this is our first bonus episode, and the idea behind this short bonus episode is to focus on one CRO question at a time. So you can always expect these bonus episodes to be way short, straight to the point, and of course, insightful. If you know a thing or two about this show, you'd know that I always ask tough questions and Khalid answers them. So the question for today is, suppose you have an e commerce website, right? And you have never done any conversion optimization before. Which page should you optimize first? Is it the category page, the product page, the cart page, or the checkout page? Let's hear what Khalid has to say about this.

Picking the right page to optimize has two different areas that you want to look at. One is the numbers and the other one is the value of the page. And let's start with the numbers. When I'm optimizing a page, I want to look at the number of visitors coming to the page and the conversions that that page generates. If that page generates, like, you know, gets 100 visitors, 500 visitors, a thousand visitors. Not a very interesting page to to optimize. However, if I find out that this page has a thousand visitors and of Those there are 400, who actually converts, whatever the definition of conversion is might be, that page just became a lot more interesting because the conversion rate is at 40%. And now I can do something interesting on that page in terms of testing it and optimizing it. So you want to look at the page, you want to look at the number of visitors, you want to look at the number of conversions. And that actually you should do before you even start digging deeper into analyzing a page based on the numbers. Does it make sense to look at this page or not? So that's one area that you want to look at. There's a whole other area which is around the value of the page and the pulse that you might have to go through when you're optimizing a page. I always joke about homepages. Homepages are political battles. People look at them, they evaluate every element. And if a site is truly optimized for SEO has really good paid campaigns, the homepage should be getting very little traffic in terms of the overall traffic that's coming to the website. The number of page views that this page, that the homepage is getting should be less than 5%. I'd rather for an E commerce website focus on pages that are getting 20, 30, 50% of the page views. My impact, my dollar impact on the site is a lot higher. So that's another area that I want to evaluate. For me, the money pages on an E commerce website start with the product page, go to the cart page, go to the checkout. So those are very clear. So I love this funnel and I love the pages in this funnel because if I can increase your conversion rate, the checkout by 10%, that is 10% revenue in the bank, no questions asked. As simple as that. If I increase the rev the conversion rate on the homepage by 10%, that might be less than half a percent if anything on your bottom line. And I'm sure I would have had to fight with you a lot more on the homepage compared to the checkout. Another set of pages that I really like to spend time on is the search results. Somebody uses the search on the site. Another is the search results. People sometimes find it very strange. But what they don't understand is for most websites, people who use the search functionality on the website have 2 to 3 to 4x higher conversion rate compared to people who don't use the search functionality. So I want to evaluate the search results page. I want to make sure that it's working better. I want to look at areas where I can optimize it because those who use the search data tells us they are highly motivated, they want to convert. You just want to give them the right information and let them have at it.